Montague Close

1897

Diamond Jubilee service, Montague Close

Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

2009

Statue outside Southwark Cathedral

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

2014

Southwark Cathedral on Montague Close

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

2025

Southwark Cathedral, today

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0

Walking Montague Close today, you step on ground that has supported Roman infrastructure, a medieval priory, and a Tudor mansion. Beneath the surface lies evidence of a Roman road that once fed traffic toward London Bridge. Above ground, the Victorian Montague Chambers marks the site where almshouses and sixty small houses once clustered. Every layer here belongs to a different century — including one of England's greatest medieval poets, who lived out his final blind years within a few steps of where you're standing.

Montague Close is named after the Viscounts Montagu, a Tudor and Jacobean family whose title passed through the site across two generations — a distinction the page previously blurred and now keeps separate. Sir Anthony Browne — Master of Horse to Henry VIII, per Layers of London — was granted the site in 1544–45 following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a transfer of monastic land into Tudor hands recorded by the Survey of London. His son became the 1st Viscount Montagu and died on 19 October 1592; the close's later, more troubled history under “Viscount Montague” in 1599–1605 most likely concerns his successor in the title, not the same individual.

The land beneath Montague Close carried a Roman road nearly two thousand years before the close existed. Excavations directed by Graham Dawson between 1969 and 1973, published in the Surrey Archaeological Society's research volume, uncovered a subsidiary Roman road aligned toward Lambeth, leading to the London Bridge bridgehead, with gravel-extraction pits and a roadside ditch flanking it, and later clay-and-timber buildings alongside the route.

A priory stood on this ground through the medieval period, alongside St Thomas's Hospital, refounded in 1215. The poet John Gower was resident at the priory when old and blind; his 1408 will included bequests to the prior, canons, and servants of St Mary Overie, and he was buried in the church, where his tomb with effigy still survives — a memorial older than Montague Close itself.

When Sir Anthony Browne received the property in 1544–5, the site's sacred character gave way to a Tudor mansion known informally as "St Mary Overies." His son, who became the 1st Viscount Montagu, likely inhabited the prior's house itself, and died on 19 October 1592.

Religious tension followed under his successor. Authorities searched Lady Montague's house for recusants in 1599; an unsubstantiated tradition later linked the site to the Gunpowder Plot's discovery, though this appears to be confusion between the names Monteagle and Montague. The 2nd Viscount Montagu was committed to the Tower on 15 November 1605 and released the following August on payment of £200 — no evidence tied him to the Plot itself, though Guy Fawkes had once worked in his household. By 1625 the estate was sold to Robert Bromfield and Thomas Overman — and the two sources disagree on what came next. The Survey of London records that the new owners replaced the site's "meane Cottages" with superior houses; Layers of London instead describes Bromfield building low-value cottages and leasing a wharf, with Montague House itself becoming a public house. Both cannot be fully right, and nothing in either source resolves the conflict. By 1775 the property comprised sixty messuages and four wharves. Separately, in 1830, the Overman almshouses were demolished for the approach to Rennie's new London Bridge — a later, distinct event, not necessarily the same buildings counted in 1775. Montague Chambers, on Southwark's local heritage list, rose in 1883 and still stands.

Montague Close carries the name of a family partly destroyed by history and partly preserved by it — the 2nd Viscount's 1605 imprisonment came in a moment his family's Catholic faith might have cost them dearly, yet the name outlasted the mansion it commemorated.

The poet John Gower was resident here when old and blind, and his 1408 will included bequests to the prior, canons, and servants of St Mary Overie; he was buried in the church. Sir Anthony Browne, Master of Horse to Henry VIII, was granted the site in 1544–5; his son became the 1st Viscount Montagu and died on 19 October 1592, and it was most likely his grandson, the 2nd Viscount, who was imprisoned here in 1605. Alice Shaw Overman, who built the almshouses here in 1771, represents the Georgian charitable impulse that gave the site a social purpose long after the priory and mansion had gone.

The 1969–73 excavations brought fresh archaeological attention to the site, recovering the Roman and medieval layers beneath the modern street and adding them to the published record.

Montague Close remains a quiet lane just south of Southwark Cathedral, its Victorian buildings still occupied, its Roman and medieval layers invisible beneath the modern pavement. Walk it today and nothing above ground announces what lies beneath — no plaque marks the Roman road, no outline traces the priory cloister. Only Montague Chambers, still standing since 1883, gives any visible sense that this short stretch of Bankside has been continuously occupied for two thousand years.